Given how popular the character turned out to be when he debuted in the first movie, not to mention the chemistry he generated with Gal Gadot, it was inevitable that Wonder Woman 1984 would find some way to bring back Chris Pine’s Steve Trevor. Being a blockbuster superhero sequel, there were any number of methods for the World War I pilot to make his grand return, but the one that the creative team settled on tended to divide opinion.
After wishing on the Dreamstone, Diana Prince is shocked when Steve shows up in the form of someone else. To the rest of the world he looks just like Handsome Man, which is genuinely what actor Kristoffer Polaha is listed as in the credits, but to the Amazonian warrior, the love of her life is standing right in front of her.
Doing what we’d all do in the same situation when a long lost paramour returns in the most unexpected of circumstances, the two almost immediately jump into bed, which is where the issues started. Fans weren’t sold on the troublesome connotations that came with Handsome Man being used in such a fashion, while the accusations got even stronger over the following days.
Now, director Patty Jenkins has broken her silence on the controversial plot device, responding to a viewer who justified the move by comparing it to the body swap genre as a whole, which you can see below.
Hahaha. Exactly @DustyDontShoot!! https://t.co/83cm3Uhb9t
— Patty Jenkins (@PattyJenks) December 30, 2020
In the aforementioned genre, there tends to be a direct switch between two people who know each other, or in the case of Big, it’s the same person in the same body, except aged up by 20 years. Wonder Woman 1984 had Steve commandeer a complete stranger, though, assume control of his faculties and banish his consciousness to parts unknown, which is where people seem to have taken issue with it given the callous way Handsome Man’s entire life was discarded.
